NAB 2012: Red: Epic goes 6K and promises 28K device

While competitors like Sony and Canon are moving up to 4K, Red Digital is to upgrade its Epic camera from 5K to a 6K sensor within six months, writes Adrian Pennington. What's more Red has a 28K sensor in development.

While competitors like Sony and Canon are moving up to 4K, Red Digital is to upgrade its Epic camera from 5K to a 6K sensor within six months, writes Adrian Pennington. What's more Red has a 28K sensor in development.

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While competitors like Sony and Canon are moving up to 4K, Red Digital is to upgrade its Epic camera from 5K to a 6K sensor within six months, writes Adrian Pennington. What's more Red has a 28K sensor in development. By year end owners of the Red Epic will be able to upgrade their 5K Mysterium-X sensor to the Red Dragon capable of 6K resolution at 85fps and 15 stops of dynamic range, up from the current 13 stops. The new sensor may also be included in the Scarlett camera and will cost $6,000 "That's a quantum leap to go to 15 stops," said Red's chief marketer Ted Shilowitz. "We already enable the current sensor to go from from 13 to 18 stops of High Dynamic Range but it is very difficult to find legitimate reasons to use it since there is already so much range on the sensor that you can hold a subject in shadow and have the sun come in as a backlight if you want. However there will be creative reasons to use higher dynamic range provided you breakout of the normalised photographic way of thinking. Imagine, if I can get a camera that does 20 stops of range what can I do with it? How can I manipulate images in production and in post to achieve effects that have never been seen before? It's what stills photographers have been doing for years ­creating other worldly experiences that even the eye can¹t perceive. Now we can do that in motion pictures." Shilowitz said Red also has 8K and 28K devices in development, the latter a super large format. "There are no limits to what we can do," said Shilowitz. "I am often asked why we need to go to 4K, 8K or beyond but that is not the right question. The question is Œwhat am I going to do with a device that can shoot at a higher resolution than I have ever seen before?" "The biggest analogue format is Imax. What if we could create a digital version of Imax without the immense cost of shooting 15 perf film? What if I could shoot a movie like Lawrence of Arabia in VistaVision 70mm ­ but digitally? At that resolution I could make 4-5 different versions from one native source. I could manipulate the image in ways we haven't even thought of. "The industry is coming round to what we have known for six years, namely that you can't do much with 1080p. You shoot it and you live with it, you can't do anything more with it. We are at a point where all other camera companies are thinking like Red. They are now where we were four years ago." SL3324